I originally wrote this post for Writer’s Digest as part of my blog tour for my book release– I wrote about 30 posts that went up on different sites over November and December, and with all that content out there, I’d like to keep it all in one place, so I’m posting it here for archiving purposes!
When I first started writing fiction, I never expected to end up writing YA. But once I discovered what a vibrant, challenging category it was, I was hooked. I love young adult fiction, and I love the authors working in the category. Explaining to my friends and family, though, what YA is and why I was taking my career in a new direction was a bit of a challenge. Here are a few reasons YA has grabbed me:
1) A wide audience. By writing YA, we’re not crossing out adult readers. YA isn’t a reading level, it’s a category of story about a particular stage in life. Many of my adult friends thought if I started writing “teen fiction” it wouldn’t be a story they’d enjoy. But about half of YA readers are over 18, and a huge portion of the adult readers of YA are over 30. I didn’t find YA and start reading it myself until I was in college—and I’m so glad I did find it, because it reminded me how honest and surprising and deeply human fiction can be.
When you write YA, you’re writing to a wide, diverse audience. Adults buy and read YA all the time. Of course, it’s important to write with teen readers in mind, too, since they’re a significant portion of the audience, and no one can sense preachy messages or condescending stories like a teen.
2) A point of change. YA explores the teenage years of a person’s life, and those years are a significant point of change for most of us. Teens are tackling adult issues for the first time—serious relationships, jobs, shifting authority structures, new limits and opportunities—but they’re doing it without the experience and often without the resources that adults may have. It’s a vulnerable, heady, thrilling stage in someone’s life. Teens are also adjusting to greater independence and more authority in their own lives, but might still be dealing with limitations at odds with those things, like curfews, not having a car, house rules, and the structures of school. I didn’t start reading YA until I reached my twenties, and I wish I’d found it earlier—seeing so closely into the lives of other teens who are wrestling with the same changes and struggles I was would have been so helpful as a teen. I still find myself identifying with the characters in these stories, because people never stop struggling with change. You don’t grow out of YA.
The experiences we have in our teenage years are formative ones, and the mistakes and choices we make can follow us into adulthood. There’s great opportunity, uncertainty, and passion in those years, and they leave a mark on us.
3) Trying new things. Experimenting with craft is another reason I love YA. It’s a brave category. Novels in second person and novels in verse. Unreliable narrators. Thick, several-hundred-page stories. Companion short stories or novellas. Genre-blending, and epistolary-style novels with texts, blog posts, letters, and graphics. So much can be done in YA, and no story is off-limits. I love being challenged as a writer, seeing a tough story and figuring out how I can tell it, and YA is a great place to be doing that. Don’t let yourself be limited by what has or hasn’t been done before—explore new devices, new ideas, and new ways of telling these stories. Like teens themselves, YA is known for being brave and taking risks.
4) Exploring tough issues. One of the main reasons I love reading and writing YA is that the category tackles such tough issues. Along with all the new independence, vulnerability, and vibrancy of teen life come problems—things we’d like to think teens don’t have to deal with, but are so often a part of their lives. Our ideas about adolescence are often at odds with the struggles of it. The weighty, bitter truths of growing up sometimes get painted over when we think about childhood. Like adults, teens have to deal with bullying, neglect, abuse, physical and mental illness, assault, discrimination, addiction, broken relationships, loss, regret, and personal failures. YA fiction is a great place to explore what those teen years really look like, and how we can adjust, heal, and reinvent ourselves. And sometimes those harsh truths take over, and YA can give us those stories, too. Sometimes the biggest struggles are crushes and cliques at school, but that’s not usually the case. The best YA is genuine and honest about what it means to be a teen.
5) Why not? A final reason I love YA is that there’s no reason not to. Teens are every bit as complex as adults, and they can think as deeply, too. Of course they can. Teens aren’t a more simplistic or less demanding audience, and their stories aren’t any simpler or less worthy. When I came to YA as an adult, what drew me in was the depth of these stories, and that’s what I’ve stayed for, too.
Teens are people, and people have fascinating stories. There’s no reason we shouldn’t write or read their stories, and there’s every reason to do exactly that. We read and write YA to remember that stage in life, to explore, to see someone else’s life, to empathize. To keep the teenage part of ourselves alive. For catharsis. For fun. To be challenged. To think. To create, and to participate. The stories in YA are first and foremost human stories, and that’s what makes them so wonderful.
You know the feeling. You’ve been writing along, feeling the gut-punch of creating an awesome scene, and when you take a break and re-read, the scene reads flat. Limp. But you’re a pro, so you know this is probably just because you’re too close to it now, so you let it go and decide to come back later. Maybe you keep writing, maybe you go read a great book or do some research to reset your brain. But when you come back, it still sounds lifeless. There’s a lot of action– someone is in danger, someone revealed something painful, or maybe it’s a fight scene. Whatever scene it is, it’s one you need to really grip your readers and land that blow, but it’s just sitting there, and you know in your gut you didn’t deliver the punch you wanted to.
Don’t ignore that feeling. If you can sense that, you have fantastic instincts. That’s your writer’s brain trying to get your attention, saying “Hey- we’ve got a problem.”
If you think about that for a minute, that will lead us to the answer. A flat scene is one that’s not getting up off the page. It’s just sitting there. It’s not alive, it’s not true-to-life in some element. We’re seeing it through a character’s eyes, but somehow that character’s experience isn’t hitting us. And it should be.
That feeling tells you you’re missing something. But when you know where to look, it can be pretty easy to see what you’re missing.
A character’s experience breaks down into 5 separate things:
Thought– In 1st and 3rd person where we’re very close to the character, a character’s thought is often also exposition. For punchy scenes, blend them better. Use the character’s voice to phrase things, don’t use too much exposition, use thoughts that heighten the tension. Make as much of the exposition thought from the character as you can– this tightens the psychic distance (the distance from the readers to the character’s mind) and gets us right in the middle of things.
Action– Usually this one isn’t the culprit, but make sure things are happening. If it’s not a particularly active scene, don’t let people just sit there. Have them use actions and gestures that heighten tension and show their emotional state. Grip things, rearrange things, pace, throw things, etc. Reaction is a big part of action– most of what we do on a daily basis is reacting to something else, and reactions are powerful things. Use your character’s reactions to show how this is affecting him/her.
Dialogue– Technically dialogue is an action, but it’s a distinct one that often either dominates a scene or gets left out, so it’s separate. Check to make sure you’re not letting it take over the scene; sometimes what’s not said is more impacting. Let us read between the lines. Make sure, too, that you actually do have dialogue in there somewhere. People accuse, demand, and give ultimatums through dialogue. Most escalation happens through dialogue, so make sure that you have it, and that what you have contributes and is the best way to show the detail.
Sensation– We all know to use the senses when we’re writing, so bring us the action through textures, instincts, sounds, detailed sights, scents (which often carry memories), even taste. We can sense something that your character doesn’t, so channel the sensations to us through him.
Emotion– This one often gets the same treatment that dialogue does– way too much or none at all. The most impacting use of emotion is usually brief and powerful. We don’t need long, winding paragraphs that drown us in grief or loneliness. By the time the reader finishes those, the action has paused for so long we’re looking around for something to happen and we’ve lost interest. Basically, we don’t care. Keep it brief, make it deep, move on. But keep it going, too. Come back to how all these actions and dialogue and sensations and thoughts are affecting your character emotionally. We get worn thin. Old wounds get opened up. We become desperate. Sometimes we’ve just had it. Keep the emotional progression of your character advancing; don’t let what they’re feeling sit there. Make it go somewhere.
If a scene feels flat, it’s almost always one of two things- 1) either you’re showing, not telling (a different post) or 2) one or more of the 5 things above is missing from your scene. In all the pages I’ve seen come through slush or edited or written, most often I see emotion and thought being the ones missing or over/underdeveloped.
Check through your scene to see if you’re missing any of those. Use highlighters if you want, and color each one of the five a different color in your scene. See what dominates. See what’s missing or needs boosted. See if any moment carries more than one.
An impacting scene is a dense chemical blend. Miss one element, and it doesn’t affect us like it should. That denseness is important, too– if you’ve got all of those things happening, it’s a lot, but it can’t take forever on the page. Make sensations carry thought. So, combine them. Make action show emotion. Use dialogue to push the action. Get two or more from that list into each moment, and you’ll have something dense and impacting. Your scene won’t be flat; it will get up off the page and have a life of its own. We’ll walk into it, and you’ll have created something we can live in, too.
Fiction is a form of art, and art is personal, subjective, and filled with exceptions.
However, fiction is also a science, with specific principles and forms that are guided by the psychology of how people read and respond to story. These things can be taught and learned. They can be added to a writer’s skill set and significantly improve both the writing and the story. (Side note: if you’ve been told you’re not a good enough writer, that’s why you should keep going if you want to be one. Like all things, becoming skilled is a process.)
The first chapter of a story, often the first two chapters, can be incredibly difficult to write. It’s often the most rewritten and revised portion of a book, and it’s the place where flaws can mean you lose the attention of an agent, editor, or readers. Readers decide within a few seconds of opening a book whether they’ll keep reading, and it’s up to those first chapters to hook the reader enough that they’ll spend hours following your characters around instead of all the other things they could be doing.
Complex stories in any genre, and especially sci-fi and fantasy, can be particularly difficult when it comes to beginnings. Almost every story needs to open with action, tension, subtext, clearly defined main characters, a compelling connection to those characters, and a central conflict or problem. Fitting all that into the first few pages of a story is hard enough, but it gets exponentially more difficult when the story contains a large cast, several subplots, a huge backstory, and multiple points of view. This is often the case with sci-fi and fantasy, and it’s those genres I see struggling the most with their beginnings. Complex contemporary stories (TV example: PARENTHOOD) can also struggle here quite a bit.
One TV show that does tension, plot, and character well is The Vampire Diaries. (Plus: Damon!) I’m using it as an example of how to open particularly difficult stories because it has an enormous cast, a backstory covering thousands of years, multiple points of view, and several main storylines and subplots.
Note: there are spoilers in this post referring to the first episode, and a few beyond that. If you haven’t seen the first few episodes, I highly recommend watching them now (Netflix has the show) to get the most out of this post and to not spoil the story.
Episode one of season one of The Vampire Diaries has a lot going on. We meet Elena, Jeremy, Jenna, Stefan, Caroline, Bonnie, Matt, Tyler, Vicki, and Damon, as well as a few minor characters. High stakes, including two deaths at the beginning, tragic pasts, supernatural content, and compelling goals for each of the main characters make this a particularly difficult story to begin. It’s a wildly successful show, with viewers coming and staying for the history, romance, tension, character depth, and moments of genuine emotion. So let’s see how the show starts a story that does all that.
Here’s the first few minutes of the show, in case you want to refresh your memory:
Personally, the first few minutes of episode one strike me as weak and scattered. We have Stefan’s voice-over telling us that he’s been hiding for centuries and that he’s a vampire. Then we switch to a car with a man and a woman returning from a concert on a foggy night. They hit someone, both people are bitten and killed by what turns out to be a vampire. This is a prologue, and I don’t think it’s a particularly effective one. When I first saw this episode, I thought the characters would be important ones, and they weren’t; I thought the concert would be important, and it wasn’t; I wondered briefly if it was a flashback, and the man and woman were Elena’s parents, which was confusing. Then we have the show’s title appear, and we cut to Stefan’s point of view, and get more voice-over telling us that his coming home is a major risk, but he has to know “her.”
So basically, we have a prologue from Stefan’s POV split in half by a prologue containing strangers and a mystery killer. The goal of the prologues, most likely, is to give us the tone of the show and let us know there’s more going on in the story than we think. Neither of these goals justifies having one, and especially not two, prologues, when it fractures the beginning and we could find out in much more subtle and intriguing ways that there’s more going on in the story than it at first looks like. Prologues like this rob the reader of wondering; we’ve been told there’s a vampire, we’ve been shown in the most obvious way that he’s not a good one, we’ve been told there’s major risk to him somehow, and we know this is all connected to the girl. All of that material would be more impacting, and therefore more compelling, if it was worked into the story bits at a time and in more subtle ways, because then the reader wonders and asks questions. That’s key to tension. (The psychology behind telling a story on screen is slightly different for movies and TV shows than for books. Prologues may be part of that; I’m addressing the techniques used in telling this story as if it were a novel.)
The story hits a much stronger note when we switch to Elena’s POV just over two minutes into the episode. This is where “chapter one” starts, and is where the strong storytelling begins. Elena is writing in her diary, which makes the title of the show make sense for the viewers. I’m not a fan of the diary element in these first few episodes, partially because it’s a bit cheesy and partially because it’s also a form of telling. The diaries of the founders are a much stronger reason for the show’s title. However, we do have some great stuff happening here. 1) We are tightly focused on a girl in a specific moment. Tight focus is necessary for story beginnings, even for stories with huge casts and long backstories. Give us a single character, MAYBE two, to connect with, and focus on the moment, the particular action that is happening right then. 2) We’re also meeting Elena on a day something changed. Starting on “the day that’s different” is a fantastic device that enables readers to jump into action and follow a character as her world alters; right there, we have action and character development, simply from watching the character react to change. Elena here is vowing to make today different by hiding her still-present grief for her first day of senior year. 3) We hear her say “Yes, I feel much better” and the camera shows us family photos on her dresser. This is fantastic tension; we know something tragic happened. We figure out what when she immediately follows that with saying she lost her parents. I’d rather see that line cut and leave the readers wondering why she’s grieving. Raising a question and then not answering it immediately raises tension and helps to hook the readers, as long as they know enough to ground themselves.
And we do know a lot about Elena, even though she’s only been on screen for a few seconds. Her room and clothing show (see? showing, not telling) us that she’s a middle-class American teenager, the photos show us a happy family, we know something went wrong and she’s struggling. The very first page of Elena’s story gives us action, tension, a bit of context, and a compelling struggle for us to connect to. Grief is universal. So is struggling to present a strong face to the world. Most viewers can relate to her, and so far she’s likeable because of it. We also have her goal, which is vital to guiding the story. Managing her grief as she starts school is enough of a goal for now. Make sure your characters have a goal right off the bat; we need to know the goal so we’re interested in whether the character succeeds or fails. We’re already reading (or watching) to find out whether the character wins, and if so, how.
Note where the story begins: we don’t have a crowded stage with several characters, we don’t have a chunk of backstory or exposition, or a high-action chase, or epic danger. We’re allowed to settle into the world by watching one character struggle with something relatable. Details are brief and impacting, and tons of information is withheld. And we have questions: how did her parents die? Where is she going? Why is today important? We’ve spent about 40 seconds with Elena by this point, so about one page. Aim for that effect with your first page. Ground us, compel us, hook us. Make us question and relate. Keep the focus tight.
The next scene cuts to the kitchen as Elena walks in, and we meet our first new character: Jenna. We’re seeing the effects of Elena being parentless because Jenna doesn’t know what to get her for breakfast, the mood is hectic, and the room is a bit of a mess. This gives us the sense things are just the bumpy side of normal here. And that’s more tension.
Adding to the tension and hectic mood, Jeremy walks in. We saw him briefly in the family photo, so we can assume he’s related. We also get a question answered: Jenna mentions their first day of school. Opening pages need to continually raise questions– some big, some minor– and answering the minor ones as we go helps to make the reader trust that the author will make progress toward answering the big ones. That makes a huge difference in whether you’re hooking the reader or frustrating him. A frustrated reader puts a book down because he doesn’t know enough to make sense of the story. A reader who is hooked keeps reading to find out. Raise questions, answer a few, and keep raising more as you go. (Side note: keeping questions floating around does more than raise tension; it also prevents you from giving tons of backstory and info-dump, which remove questions, slow the pacing, and cause readers to skim.)
We’ve also got bits of character development scattered all through this. Jenna is overwhelmed but trying hard. She offers breakfast, lunch money, and anything else she can think of. She forgets about her presentation, and dashes out the door late for it. Jeremy has tension written all over him; from his movements to his lack of eye contact, he shows he’s withdrawn and unhappy. He takes the lunch money; Elena doesn’t. Elena, in fact, is the one to remind Jenna of her presentation. We immediately, less than 3 pages into the story, have these characters pegged: Jenna is trying but is in over her head, Jeremy is unhappy and acting out, and Elena is grieving, responsible, and trying to help others around her. This is enough of a sprinkling of character development for us to get a clear picture of who they are. Later they’ll get deeper, but it’s enough for now.
Right before the scene ends, we get the tension raised again: Elena asks her brother if he’s okay, he rolls his eyes and says, “Don’t start,” and Elena is annoyed and hurt. The focus shifts from Elena to the TV behind her, where we see a news broadcast with photos of the two people who were killed coming home from the concert during the prologue. We have tension between Elena and Jeremy, which lets us know there are problems there. We wonder why, and what kind of problems. We have a callback to the killings on the road, letting us know they’ll come up again and be important.
This is all in the first minute and a half of the show past the prologues, and probably about the equivalent of the first three pages of a story. A little more than this is what you’d include as sample pages in your query. This amount of story is actually more than most readers will give your book when they’re browsing in Barnes & Noble, and agents will often need even less to tell if your story isn’t for them.
Openings are difficult because they have to do so much in so little space. Sprinkling is the key. Even when you have a massive story and a large cast, keep the focus tight and as you expand it, just sprinkle in the tension and details and relationships. That’s what I want to emphasize here. Of course genre differences apply– frequently there’s more action and suspense in thrillers, for example. But in general, just use bits of information, shades of development. Sprinkle in those things, and you’ll have to room to get your plot and characters on stage, leaving room for character goals, tension, action, and suspense. Even the plot should develop in small steps. Notice none of the storylines have been developed yet. We don’t know much about any one thing, but we know a little bit about a lot of things. We have a hint of something supernatural. We’re grounded in a modern middle-class American high school life. We have a family in turmoil because of recent deaths. Our main character has a goal; Elena desperately wants to start off her senior year with a strong face. Plus, we have dozens of questions, and numerous possibilities for things to go wrong. School is starting, something’s wrong with Jeremy, Jenna is overwhelmed and might have trouble with these teenagers, and we know there’s a stranger in town and there’s been two killings. Readers will keep reading, and agents and editors would be interested because the story is already complex and layered with relatable characters, and the information release and tension are subtley done.
Yes, there are exceptions, and yes, a particularly strong element can carry weaker elements and still have a strong opening for the story. But if exceptions were what usually worked, they wouldn’t be called “exceptions.” And if you have a particularly strong element in your beginning, don’t burden it by making it carry a flawed structure or weak characters.
These are the kinds of things that make for a strong opening to a big story. Tight focus, a strong goal for the main character, questions, tension, suspense, a bit of context, development of the main character and their relationships, and enough action to take the story just a step forward. All this should happen in a very few number of pages, and the key is sprinkling. If you have chunks of any one thing in your first pages, chances are it’s crowding out other things that need to be there. It definitely can be done; TVD did all that, prologues included, in three minutes and thirty seconds. Sprinkle them in at the beginning, then pull on those threads once you have everything on stage.
This is part one of a series of posts on TVD episode one, so come back next time to look at how TVD pulls on all those threads!
What are your thoughts? Are you a TVD fan? What’s the best advice you’ve heard on writing or structuring opening pages?
I’m starting a blogging challenge! I’ll be blogging every day for the next 22 days about Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling. I’ll blog on one rule each day- short posts with my thoughts and reactions to the principle. Basically, the how and why of the idea.
So, here’s why I’m doing this challenge:
Back in 2012, Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats tweeted 22 140-character pieces of writing wisdom under the hashtag #storybasics. If I’m understanding the story correctly, these aren’t official pieces of advice from Pixar itself nor are they necessarily techniques or ideas Ms. Coats developed herself. I’ve seen some of the ideas elsewhere, and some are time-tested story techniques. Here’s her post compiling the advice.
The advice Ms. Coats tweeted circulated widely under the name “Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling.” March 13 of this year, an article from The New Yorker, “The Problem with Processed Storytelling“, discusses the idea of those 22 rules. The article protests that “the story-processing that the Pixar list outlines turns movies into a delivery system for a uniform set of emotional juicings, and the result, whether for C.G.I. or for live-action films, is a sort of cyborg cinema, a prefabricated simulacrum of experience and emotion that feels like the nexus of pornography and propaganda.”
I disagree. Storytelling works according to certain principles, which can be bent or turned inside out as creativity demands, but it still operates according to basic ideas. Why? Because of how humans process and perceive things. Following those principles doesn’t create a cookie-cutter, emotionally-manipulative product. Poor execution of those ideas might, but that’s just poor writing. Good writing uses principles like Pixar’s 22 rules to tap into how people think and react, thereby connecting with the audience. Writing is both an art and a science, and it does function according to certain basic principles.
My purpose here isn’t to discuss the article from The New Yorker, however. The article just provided my motivation for the blogging challenge. So, I’ll be blogging about 1 rule a day, starting tomorrow morning!
Writers, if you want to join the blogging challenge, let me know on Twitter or in the comments here! I have a few friends who are going to do this with me, and I’ll be linking to their blogs in the bottom of each of my posts. Basically, you’d post once a day (or more if you didn’t see this in time and need to catch up a day or two), working down through the list of rules I linked to above. Link to the other bloggers (who will be introduced in my post for day 1) at the bottom of your daily post. That’s it!
Readers, keep an eye out for my post on Rule #1 tomorrow morning! Also, check out the 22 rules from Ms. Coates and read the New Yorker article, if you like. It’s interesting stuff and they do have some worthy points. In case you’re interested to see more of my thoughts on that article, here are my thoughts I posted on Twitter this morning.
I have so many issues with that storytelling response article I just tweeted. So many. Prepare for a rant. #Pixar
A writer’s job is to read, read, read. Read fiction. Read nonfiction for research and nonfiction on your craft. Read your manscript aloud. Read publishing industry news. Read more fiction- bestsellers, books in your genre, and books nothing like your own. Read until your eyes cross. Read, read, read.
One of the most important things for aspiring authors to read is agent blogs. Whether you are querying agents, trying to break into the publishing business, or simply learning more about the world of books, agent blogs are an absolutely necessary source of information. During my plunge into querying agents, I’ve painstakingly divested the internet of its most valuable resource (don’t argue with me on that descriptor): agent blogs.
Blog posts from industry professionals contain the personal details you need to make your queries stand out, the contests that will give you a leg up, and the industry knowledge that will help jump start your writing career.
Janet Reid, Literary Agent: Posts by agent Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management. This blog in particular contains a wealth of information and blunt advice for writers. Janet has also been known to host contests.
Query Shark: Janet Reid, master shark of the query waters, also maintains this blog where she dices queries to bits. Enter yours, if you dare! Reading the archives is one of the most entertaining and alarming things you’ll do as a writer.
Pub Rants: Maintained by agent Kristin Nelson of Nelson Literary Agency. Personal, informative posts about all things literary.
Rachelle Gardner: Posts by Rachelle with Books and Such Literary Agency. Many of these posts contain enormously helpful information on the daily life of a successful author- taxes, social media, and the changing publishing landscape are all covered.
Coffee. Tea. And Literary: Blog of the Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation. Contests are occasionally run here as well.
Kathleen Ortiz: Agent with Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation.
Glass Cases: Blog of the fabulous agent Sarah LaPolla with Curtis Brown, Ltd., featuring short stories, flash fiction, and memoir and novel excerpts from readers.
DGLM: Blog maintained by Dystel and Goderich Literary Management. Frequent posts revealing the world of publishing and writing in valuable detail.
Full Circle Literary: Blog of Full Circle Literary, with archives going back to 2006.
Et in arcaedia, ego. Blog of Jennifer Jackson, powerhouse agent and Vice President of Donald Maass Literary Agency. Frequent “query wars” reports and contests. Archives back to 2003.
The Knight Agency: Blog of The Knight Agency- fantastic recent post on preparing your manuscript for submission.
Lucienne Diver’s Drivel: News, advice, and entertainment from author, agent, and superhero Lucienne Diver.
Agent Savant: “publishing morsels from Laurie McLean.”
Babbles from Scott Eagan: posts from Scott Eagan from Greyhaus Literary Agency. Frank and unique presentations of industry news and advice.
Slush Pile Hell: “one grumpy literary agent, a sea of query fails, and other publishing nonsense.” Sometimes it helps to see what not to do in your query.
The Steve Laube Agency: Browse it and learn from it- you’ll love it. Fantastic “News You Can Use” feature.
Upstart Crow Literary: new book announcements, advice on getting published, and more.
Navigating the Slush Pile: “Agent and book lover discovers the world of publishing one fast paced, eye opening step at a time, armed with only a handful of books and an English Lit Degree.” Posts by Vickie Motter, agent with Andrea Hurst Literary Management.
Inactive Blogs
BookEnds, LLC- A Literary Agency: Recently inactive, but chock-full of must-read posts on submissions, query letter samples, and pitch lines.
Fox Literary: Blog of Diana Fox of boutique agency Fox Literary.
Agent Advice: “a series of quick interviews with literary and script agents who talk with Guide to Literary Agents about their thoughts on writing, publishing, and just about anything else.”
Literary Rambles: “spotlighting children’s book authors, agents, and publishing.” The agent spotlights are invaluable for personalizing your query letter.
Mother. Write. (Repeat.) Long list of agent interviews. Be sure to check out the main page of this blog for “how I got my agent” stories, contests, and more.
YA Highway: Writers hosting contests, introducing agents, and collecting publishing news. Fantastic resource.
Comment to let me know what you think of these! I’d love to hear any agent-related blogs you follow. I’ll add them to the list! As always, thanks for reading.
This week I was working on synesthesia in writing with my students. It’s not used prolifically in modern fiction, and I am surprised because it is an extremely powerful tool.
M.H. Abrams defines synesthesia as “one kind of sensation in terms of another; color is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so on.” When writers do this, they give the reader another level on which to experience the idea or image. This adds weight, and not only that, the unusual nature of synesthesia almost guarantees your readers will remember it.
Common examples from everyday speech would be a “warm” color, a “heavy” silence, or a “bright” sound. Each of these things describe something perceived with one of our six senses to another sensory perception. Warmth is something we feel while color is something we see. Adding this layer of experience to a color gives it a 3D effect. These are, of course, very basic examples.
Switchfoot uses synesthesia to great effect in their song “Restless,” with the line “the endless aching drops of light”. This line has other poetic effects going on within it, but describing light in terms of drops, and more than that, describing the drops in terms of an emotion, gives them enormous power.
Many people have probably used synesthesia without noticing it; you’ve probably used some of those common examples yourself. The technique is well-worth using intentionally, however. A well-crafted use of synesthesia can make a passage memorable and impacting.
So, as I work over the draft of my novel to edit the language for active verbs instead of passive verbs, conciseness, fewer modifiers in exchange for stronger verbs and nouns, etc., I’ll be adding intentional, poetic use of synesthesia to the checklist.
What about you? Have you ever used synesthesia in your writing? Have you come across a great use of synesthesia in literature?
As I work on revising my novel this week, I’m going over my character development. My novel has a wide cast and that’s challenging (but fun) to manage. Currently I’m working out notes on each character to make sure my portrayal of each one is consistent and that they are as fully developed as their roles require. This has, of course, brought me back to my books.
My post for this week will therefore be a breakdown of the nuts and bolts of character development. As always, challenge, question, and comment below, please!
The goal of character development is to create characters exactly suited to your purpose. In my experience, there are 3 levels of characters. Tertiary characters (background people- the cab driver or cashier, perhaps) should be flat characters that don’t distract your readers. They aren’t interesting and they shouldn’t be interesting. For them, this this is good character development.
Secondary characters are much more complicated, of course, as are primary characters. These two types of characters are what I will generally be referring to throughout this post.
With primary characters, the goal is exactly the opposite of flat and uninteresting. They should be, as Brandi Reissenweber puts it in Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School, “real enough to cast shadows.” Before we look at how to do this, let’s look at why we want this from our characters. In Master Class in Fiction Writing, Adam Sexton says, “If they are well-wrought, stories intrigue, entertain and satisfy us. But it is characters that we love— and love hating. In the short stories and novels we read and reread, it is characters above all that we cherish.” Characters are what make your readers attached to your work. They make your writing memorable. Ebenezer Scrooge, Neville Longbottom, Elizabeth Bennett and Anne Shirley are an enormous part of what makes their novels compelling.
So, how do you make the next Huck Finn, the next Atticus Finch? There is no recipe for characters like that, and a lot of it has to do with talent (both learned and natural talent). However, there are consistent elements involved in developing characters that are complex, memorable, and realistic.
Active protagonists are essential. With few exceptions, a story with a passive protagonist will eventually wither and die. Protagonists set the story in motion; they drive the action. If they aren’t active, neither is the story. An active protagonist is one who wants something. This is key to a good protagonist. Again, Reissenweber says, “Desire beats in the heart of every dimensional character. A character should want something. Desire is a driving force of human nature and, applied to characters, it creates a steam of momentum to drive a story forward.” How badly the character wants whatever they want tells the readers how hard to root for them to succeed– if Atticus only sort of wants to win the trial, readers will only sort of care.
This desire must be something internal and external. Characters have to desire something tangible that is core to their identity. For example, a teenager put into foster care as an infant may desire to know his birth-mother. This may be borne of an internal desire to find his identity- who he is and why. The tangible, plot-propelling expression of that is the hunt for his mother. Note that because this desire is key to who he is, he will, guaranteed, want it badly. Linda Seger, in her book, Making a Good Writer Great, notes says that “Yearnings push and pull at us…Sometimes they’re so strange that we wonder what anyone would think about us if they really knew what we yearned for, or how much we yearned for it… Too many characters lack guts and vibrancy because they only have a wee bit of want, rather than raging desires.” An internal desire to be loved, to be accepted, and to take control of one’s life (and many more desires like these) are realistic internal desires that a character could have, and the tangible, concrete counterpart desires he may have are endless. Your character must have them, however.
One more important note is that this abstract, internal desire is often a big part of what connects us to a character. For instance, most of us know and empathize with the need to be loved, and we will connect with a character who wants that badly.
Besides a strong internal desire mirrored by a strong external desire, there are 4 more main traits of solid characters. The second trait is complexity. No human can be reduced to a stereotype, and characters shouldn’t be, either. Characters may start with a type- the farmer, the feminist, the rural preacher, the hipster, the gold digger– but they must, absolutely must, transcend type. They must be different from anyone else of that stereotype. The farmer might secretly study foreign politics. The feminist may love gardening with a passion. The preacher might be a compulsive liar. The reasons why they do these things that separate them from their stereotypes make them real people. These differences should include flaws and virtues, as well. The sinless hero and the completely evil villain are stereotypes themselves.
The third element is contrasting traits. All people, as you peel back the layers, have conflicting characteristics. Personally, I am a social person– to a point. I am social, and I am also not. One of my characters in my novel does not want a husband- but she does want children. Ebenezer Scrooge is a hard-hearted miser, but deep down (deep, deep down), there is a part of him that is still a little boy. These contrasting traits happen because of all the baggage we carry around with us. All the things that influence who we are help create these contrasting layers. My husband still surprises me with the things he does, and not because I don’t know him well or because he’s an inconsistent person (he isn’t). It’s because people are complex beings with multiple reasons for why we do what we do. Sometimes one reason wins out, and sometimes another does. This creates those layers, those contrasting traits, and the characters in our fiction should have them too. A character without them won’t be convincing.
I just mentioned consistency, and that is the forth element of round characters. Consistency is the effect of readers being able to see why the contrasting traits exist. So as your characters live out their lives in your plot, make sure there are solid, consistent reasons behind why they do what they do. They may do surprising things (and they should) as long as we can see why that choice was made. Elizabeth Bennett said she’d never marry Mr. Darcy, but she did, and we believe it because we can see why she did. She changed her mind, but the reason she did is still consistent with who she is.
Of course, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy both changed as characters over the course of the novel, and ability to change is the fifth characteristic of sound characters. The possibility for characters to change keeps us reading and keeps the characters from being predictable. We want to know if Scrooge becomes a better, happier soul; if Neville Longbottom rises out of his shy, bumbling childhood; if Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy can change enough to value each other as they ought to. They might, they might not– we read to find out. Here too we find ourselves rooting for this kind of character, and if he or she has a strong internal and external desire, we’re doubly captivated.
Those 5 things -desire, complexity, contrasting traits, consistency, and ability to change- are the main elements of compelling, realistic characters. Now, say you’ve got that all worked out. More than that, you’ve got pages filled with who this character is beyond these 5 traits. You know his his backstory, his favorite kind of peanut butter, his nervous habits, and what makes him happy, sad, and angry. How do you make all this complexity come across in your writing? How do you characterize him within your story?
There are 4 main methods of characterization. The first is what the character does. This is the closest thing we have to objective information about who a character truly is– what she does. Adam Sexton also points out that, “if readers have observed an aspect of character in a scene, they will more likely remember it.” So, instead of telling us what she did, have her do it in a scene. It gives us strong evidence about who she truly is, and we’re likely to remember it since we saw it.
The second method of showing character is through what the character says (or thinks, if we have access to that through the point-of-view.) This is, of course, more biased and subjective than actions. Kind words, judgmental statements, or pithy thoughts let us in on how characters think and who they are. Complaints, wise advice, thoughtful responses… these things are great opportunities for readers to see who your characters are.
The third method is through what other characters say or think about that character. This method is especially useful because it characterizes both the speaker and the character about whom she is speaking. If I say harsh words about a friend of mine, it may tell the reader something about my friend, but it will likely also tell the reader something about me. It may tell a great deal, in fact.
The final main method of showing characterization is through what the narrator tells us. Except for cases of unreliable narrators, the narrator is honest and unbiased. We don’t have to filter what he tells us. Make use of this reliable perspective for elements of your character that you absolutely don’t want doubted, and then support those traits with the other methods.
In all these things, subtlety is the goal. If these things are done heavy-handedly, readers will feel forced or manipulated. Being too obvious is just as bad as being confusing, if not worse, so this is where practice and good feedback is important in character development. Learning to see where you are overwriting and where you are being too subtle is important to having truly realistic characters, characters who keep readers coming back and are real enough to cast shadows.
Of course, there is much more that can be said about each of these areas, and I have glossed over and abbreviated many things. The three books I reference in this post have excellent sections on character development and I highly recommend turning to them for additional examples and explanation. Thank you for reading!
Kate Brauning 